Data & Analytics Enterprise Architect

Principal Financial Group • Des Moines, IA

1d • Hybrid

About The Position

The Senior Enterprise Data & Analytics Architect designs, governs, and evolves the enterprise analytics architecture to enable trusted, scalable, and self-service decisioning. This role translates business outcomes into an actionable analytics architecture across modern cloud data platforms, ensuring data is consistent, governed, high-performing, and AI-ready. You will lead warehouse/Lakehouse architecture, data products, semantic layers, and metrics governance—partnering with engineering, BI, and data science to standardize patterns, develop best practices, architecture decisions and accelerate delivery. Success in this role is measured by faster time-to-insight, consistent KPI definitions across the enterprise, improved platform performance/cost, and increased reuse of governed data products.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree OR equivalent work experience
• 8+ years of experience with a multi-business unit global organization
• 8+ years in data & analytics architecture, analytics engineering, or enterprise analytics roles
• 3+ years hands-on experience designing on modern cloud data platforms (Databricks, Snowflake, or equivalent)
• Demonstrates skilled level of business and professional breadth of knowledge and Enterprise Architecture expertise.
• Familiar and understand connections between Enterprise Architecture domains including Business Architecture, Information / Data Architecture, Software / Application Architecture, Technology / Infrastructure Architecture, and Security Architecture with expertise in one or more Enterprise Architecture domains
• Demonstrated commitment to continuous learning and growth within architecture field (i.e., training, or architectural certifications such as TOGAF or Certified Business Architect)
• Experience with an Agile software development lifecycle and where Enterprise Architecture will provide value across the lifecycle.
• Hands-on architectural experience with: Databricks and/or Snowflake in enterprise environments
• Strong understanding of: Lakehouse vs warehouse architecture, Information catalogs on Snowflake and/or Databricks, Compute–storage separation, Cost and performance optimization for analytics workloads
• Experience enabling analytics use cases at scale on cloud platforms
• Advanced analytical and dimensional data modeling expertise
• Strong SQL and query optimization skills
• Hands on experience of various modeling approaches – logical, physical and dimensional
• Experience building semantic layers and governed metrics
• Understanding of ETL, ELT patterns and analytics pipeline design
• Agile delivery method, process and toolings
• Experience on an AWS cloud platform (or equivalent)
• Familiarity with: Cloud native analytics services, Metadata management and data catalogs, Data observability and quality tooling
• Ability to translate business requirements into scalable analytics designs
• Strong understanding of: KPIs, Management and operational reporting
• Excellent communication, presentation, and stakeholder engagement skills

Nice To Haves

• Industry experience in BFSI preferable
• Architecture or cloud certifications

Responsibilities

• Define and maintain the enterprise data and analytics architecture blueprints, vision, principles, and target states.
• Ensure data ecosystem alignment with enterprise architecture strategy, business capabilities, and operating models.
• Collaborate to manage, maintain, and mature the health of data and analytics capabilities for the enterprise.
• Define and maintain the enterprise analytics architecture across modern data platforms including: Analytical data models and marts, Semantic and metrics layers, Cloud data lake and warehouse solutions.
• Design analytics solutions optimized for: BI reporting, Self-service analytics, Advanced analytics and AI consumption.
• Ensure analytics architectures scale with growing data volumes and concurrent users.
• Own the analytics architecture roadmap (target state, phased migration, and decommission plan) aligned to business priorities.
• Define reference architectures, standards, and guardrails; serve as design authority for analytics modeling and consumption patterns.
• Own analytical and dimensional data models for enterprise reporting.
• Design and govern: Conformed dimensions, Business metrics and KPIs, Semantic layers on top of Databricks / Snowflake.
• Enable tool agnostic analytics consumption across multiple BI platforms.
• Ensure consistency of definitions across dashboards, reports, and AI use cases.
• Drive a data-as-a-product approach for analytical datasets, including product ownership, lifecycle management, and adoption.
• Define analytics data products hosted on Databricks / Snowflake with clear onboarding, versioning, and support processes, including: Clear schemas and contracts, Quality thresholds and SLAs, Documented usage patterns.
• Enable discoverability, trust, and reuse through catalog and marketplace integration.
• Architect analytical solutions on Snowflake including: Data modeling for analytics workloads, Performance optimization and cost efficiency, Workload separation and concurrency management.
• Define best practices for: Delta Lake / Iceberg / analytical table formats, Warehouse and cluster sizing strategies, Ingestion and transformation patterns, Caching and query optimization.
• Guide teams on: Snowflake SQL, notebooks, and compute patterns, Snowflake virtual warehouses, clustering, and data sharing.
• Design analytics architectures that support BI, ML, AI/NLQ and data science workloads on the same platform.
• Implement analytics-focused governance on cloud data platforms: Row-level and column-level security, Dynamic data masking, Secure data sharing mechanisms.
• Define and monitor analytics data quality rules.
• Ensure compliance with enterprise security, privacy, and regulatory standards.
• Partner with data governance and platform security teams.
• Collaborate closely with: Data engineers, Analytics and BI teams, Data scientists, Enterprise and solution architects.
• Provide architectural leadership and design governance.
• Mentor teams on analytics modeling, platform usage, and best practices.

Benefits

• Flexible Time Off (FTO) is provided to salaried (exempt) employees and provides the opportunity to take time away from the office with pay for vacation, personal or short-term illness.
• Pension Eligible

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: Associate degree